Americans waste about 4.2 billion hours a year stuck in traffic, a soaring increase in gridlock that has occurred because we’ve become obsessed with FasTracks-style solutions that don’t work.

That’s the argument of “Gridlock: Why We’re Stuck in Traffic and What to Do About It,” the newest book by Randal O’Toole, the libertarian transportation expert who warned the Denver area in 2004 that FasTracks was wildly optimistic — and who has been proven correct.

Spending billions of transportation dollars once used to repair and expand roads and highways on pricey transit systems that move less than 5 percent of the population has brought the greatest transportation system in the world to a dramatic slowdown.

Charting the advantages brought about by the overwhelming use of automobiles, and contrasting it with the ever-falling use of mass transit (despite claims that ridership at new transit lines is rising, per capita use of transit has been getting smaller for years) or interest in so-called “transit-oriented development” communities (which have to be subsidized to attract residents whose driving habits hardly change), O’Toole argues we should never again allow our city planners to utter any iteration of the belief that “We can’t build our way out of congestion.”

Historically, the opposite has been true.

O’Toole doesn’t just critique. He also offers possible solutions that use existing infrastructure more efficiently by embracing technological breakthroughs, such as highly advanced traffic-signal coordination to keep traffic flowing.

The most exotic solution sounds awfully futuristic. O’Toole argues that technology that is already available, and which is rapidly advancing, would allow ultra-smart passenger cars to follow GPS directions on their own to get passengers where they are going. Using the lightning-fast reflexes of robots, driverless cars would shoot along at high speeds, instantaneously avoid slowdowns and thereby revolutionize existing roadways to quadruple their capacity — even during rush hour.

O’Toole recently met with The Post editorial board, and answered some questions.

Denver Post: Could passengers still manually drive these cars in case of malfunction or roads ill-equipped for the technology?

Randal O’Toole: Yes, my expectation is for awhile, we will have driverless cars mixed in traffic with driver-operated vehicles. We will have roads that will be more driverless than others. But I’m concerned about mediating this transition period.

We have automakers who are making cars that are near driverless (like Audi and Volkswagen), but the highway owners, the states, aren’t lifting a finger. So I want to put pressure on the states to sit down with automakers and set standards. Say, “What is going to be the technological path? Are we going to have some kind of highways by 2015 that are exclusively driverless? Are we going to have some roads that are open to driverless? How are we going to do it?”

RO: They can. But at some point, the benefits of driverless will be so great in terms of capacity and in terms of safety that vehicle-to-vehicle collisions will be very rare.

DP: But the first time there is a glitch and there is a big pileup, no one will trust them.

RO: There wouldn’t be a pileup. The first car might have an accident, but all the others would detect it and go around it.

DP: You argue that such things as light rail could be scrapped for fleets of driverless cars to move commuters. How would that work?

RO: There are already car-sharing companies in many cities. You just go out and pick up a car and you pay a daily fee for using it and you drop it off and that’s it. Volkswagen has a website (Volkswagen2028.com) where they imagine that in 2028 all cars are driverless, most cars are shared. You can own your own car if you want, or in the video they show people walking through the park and they say, “I want a car. OK, what kind of car do you want today?” They call on their iPhone, order a sports car and one drives itself up, they get in and drive off.

I can’t foresee exactly what will happen, but I don’t see a need for a lot of high-capacity transit systems. We have millions of different origins, millions of different destinations. High-capacity transit doesn’t make sense in our society. The idea that we should be building a whole bunch of it for the day that we run out of oil, when it turns out that cars are more energy-efficient than trains no matter what you power them with, doesn’t make sense.

DP: And you argue those high-capacity systems are not just costly at the front end. The full system of rails and cars and stations and power lines must be replaced every 30 years.

RO: Look at New York City and Chicago. They’re looking at spending tens of billions of dollars to rebuild their systems. In most cases, that’s money they don’t have. Almost all the transit accidents you’ve heard about in Washington, D.C., have been due to maintenance problems. In 2002, they projected they would need $12 billion over the next decade to refurbish, and they only got like $1.5 billion. The first light rail system was built in 1981 in San Diego, so it will be 30 years old next year. So we’ll see these problems start to crop up in San Diego, then a few years later in Sacramento and Portland and so on.

DP: Meanwhile, you found that even cities that have embraced transit and so-called “smart growth” planning have seen transit ridership fall. How is that possible?

RO: People are getting more and more cars. Even now, only 75 percent of African-American families have a car. And it’s about the same for Hispanic families, which are buying cars at a much faster rate. As more and more people get cars, fewer and fewer people ride transit.

DP: And you further argue that those who do live in transit-oriented developments drive just as much as those who don’t.

RO: Polls show that about 20 percent of Americans want to live in a LoDo, and so you make that available, you’re going to attract those kinds of people. They will drive less. But once you saturate the demand, what cities have had to do is start subsidizing [the extra capacity]. Once you start subsidizing it, then the people who start moving in to these transit-oriented developments are not the kind of people who want to live car-free lives. So it’s really important that you have lots of parking in these developments, or the vacancy rates are really high. And the people who live there don’t drive significantly less than the people who live in single-family homes. Ultimately the data show there’s not a significant overall reduction in automobile use.

Chuck Plunkett is The Denver Post's editorial page editor. A professional journalist for more than 20 years, he served as The Post's politics editor from July 2011 through July 2016. Plunkett worked for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, his hometown paper, and for The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review before coming to The Denver Post in 2003, where he ultimately began developing his writing about politics as the newsroom's lead writer covering Denver's preparation for the Democratic National Convention in 2008.

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